Hacker News: microcentury

New comment by microcentury in "Real Me and Fake Me"

microcentury — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 06:31:53 +0000

My last comment was in 2013. I'll see you again in 2031. I hope you'll continue to defend the flame of HN.

New comment by microcentury in "Prepare to Quit Smoking"

microcentury — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:17:32 +0000

I'm sure that it is, and many people seem to do it. However, it's a lot easier to see smoking as it really is and be happy to walk away from it.

New comment by microcentury in "Prepare to Quit Smoking"

microcentury — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:50:55 +0000

Have a look at the book or seminar - the enjoyment of cigaretts is dealt with at length and forms a core pillar of the argument. If you don't want to quit though, then you don't want to quit and nothing is going to make you open the book with an open mind.

New comment by microcentury in "Prepare to Quit Smoking"

microcentury — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:53:16 +0000

For any smokers out there reading this and thinking, 'God I will never quit if I have to spend the rest of my life resisting the urge for a cigarette', like this article says, note that it doesn't have to be that way. I quit smoking six months ago and every day without cigarettes is a blessing. I _hated_ smoking, and I wanted to stop, and for years and years I couldn't stop. And then I did, and I am free, and it is wonderful. Why the hell would I want to go back to the thing that I hated and was killing me, like this person? If you see cigarettes for what they really are, as a non-smoker sees them, how could you ever want to smoke?

These arguments come from Allnn Carr's stop smoking methodology. You can read his book or do a seminar. And for those out there who say 'it doesn't work': I read that book the first time in 2003, and probably more than ten times since. I attended the seminar three times. It was finally the online seminar that made the ideas click for me. (The breakthrough was the realisation that the response that says 'I want a cigarette' is a broken thought process that was learned, i.e. is not natural, and can be unlearned.) Now that the ideas have clicked into place for me I am absolutely certain I will never smoke again. When I hear the 'I want a cigarette' thought, I don't have a melancholy response that I can't smoke. I hated smoking! I have a happy response that I have learned how to get back to very close to the state I was in before I ever smoked at all.

Anyway, I am sure this article is well-intentioned, but I would strongly strongly suggest that if you haven't tried Allan Carr's method you give it a shot, and if you have tried it, give it another try. Smoking is a nightmare from which we all can awake.

New comment by microcentury in "How 2 African Tribesmen Make Almost $7000 per Month Online"

microcentury — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:45:48 +0000

Also calling shenanigans. The sentence 'As a graduate student at Harvard she had become familiar with the Bing search engine's advanced capabilities' reeks of marketing.

New comment by microcentury in "Old People"

microcentury — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:11:42 +0000

Slightly off topic: Are there no male executives left in the world? All that politically admirable use of 'she' was linguistically very jarring, and an unnecessary distraction from a fine article. Have we not pretty much agreed on 'they' as being the gender-neutral acceptable alternative to 'he'?

New comment by microcentury in "Elon Musk: 'Europe's rocket has no chance'"

microcentury — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:04:19 +0000

This is slightly off topic, but I would just _love_ to know how Musk manages his time. He has the same number of hours as the rest of us - how does he divide them between his personal research and actually getting stuff done? What percentage does he spend on marketing versus engineering, PR versus logistics, and on and on... Man I would love to have a drink with that guy. There has been no other contemporary person in any sphere of human endeavour I have been so fan-boyish about.

New comment by microcentury in "Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change"

microcentury — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:28:45 +0000

-> Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary.

This absolutely does not follow. Woodside is a senior trusted Google executive.

Edit: Removed absent-minded italics tags.

New comment by microcentury in "Show HN: My one month side-project, Lucid Tracker: a daily life tracking tool"

microcentury — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:13:13 +0000

Really like it! Only feedback so far is 'Create report from template' is not intuitive to me. Would something like 'Enter today's data' work better, or is there an angle here I'm missing?

New comment by microcentury in "Google Talk is down"

microcentury — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:15:00 +0000

Affecting hangouts also for me (Ireland)

New comment by microcentury in "How I Tricked Myself Into Being Awesome"

microcentury — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:38:15 +0000

Fair point, noted and accepted :-)

New comment by microcentury in "How I Tricked Myself Into Being Awesome"

microcentury — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:41:39 +0000

She does sound like an incredible person, but what are we supposed to do with that information? Does it mean we should not try and do anything, given there is always someone out there who has a 'better' (for very wide definitions of 'better') story? I don't write this to be snarky, and I used to think in a similar way myself, but this is not a good way to see the world.

New comment by microcentury in "The Types of Emails not to Send Us (websummit.net)"

microcentury — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:53:19 +0000

I would bet my house this is supposed to be a joke. It just falls slightly short of the mark in a way that's hard to define, and so looks like it might possibly be serious. It comes from the same school of humour that occasionally gets Irish people arrested by Homeland Security when they're asked if they have anything dangerous in their bags, and they roll their eyes and say 'Yeah, a bomb.'

New comment by microcentury in "25 years of OS/2: the legendary failure that refuses to die."

microcentury — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:45:08 +0000

Same thing here, also 2008, but with an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin. The machine crashed as I was using it and permanently relieved me of my bank card, but the up side was that I got to watch the entire OS/2 Warp boot sequence play out.

New comment by microcentury in "How Apple's Top Secret Product Development Process Works"

microcentury — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:44:15 +0000

The http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1455516074/ref=cm_cr_d...

Anyone read it and care to comment?

New comment by microcentury in "Programmers: The New Political Elite"

microcentury — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:50:26 +0000

Completely agreed on both points. The first line is so baffling I read it twice. Do they think programmers talk to each other in this mysterious 'code'? The writer of this article would be deeply disappointed by a glance at Code Academy.

New comment by microcentury in "My offer to Google Reader"

microcentury — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:15:45 +0000

It really is astonishing how much bile and vitriol can be caused by a UI change. I guess it's a subset of the general dislike of change most people have. And it's also amazing how absolutely certain some people are that their own view is the right one.

I'm not a fan of the new UI yet, but I suspect in a few weeks I will have forgotten what the old one was like.

New comment by microcentury in "Google Drive: Is the Dropbox Party Over?"

microcentury — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:42:26 +0000

But Google 'gives everything away' (with indirect monetisation), both the products that succeed and the products that fail. So in that sense this is just a list of failed products which are the byproduct of innovation at such a scale, rather than an indication of what has worked and what has not for Google in the past. Surely in this case, going up against a competitor that needs to charge, Google would be at a massive advantage (legality aside) by not having to charge?

New comment by microcentury in "Stanford CS course on digital photography"

microcentury — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:09:35 +0000

If you find one I would be interested, as I've also searched for this without success.

New comment by microcentury in "Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight"

microcentury — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:28:18 +0000

The way things are right now, maybe this blows over and the AirBnB business model continues just the way it was, with its associated massive valuation. If they help everyone in the way you are suggesting, the model is _definitely_ finished, because you cannot create the expectation that AirBnB will pick up the pieces every time something goes wrong. And the more people use the service, the mores cases like this there will be. Also, AirBnB are almost certainly getting legal advice that says not to have any unnecessary communication with EJ in preparation for a law suit that looks to me like it's inevitable.

So your sentiments are admirable, but not practical. My heart goes out to that girl too, I have to say. She's clearly a sensitive soul, and this has really messed her up. I hope she can get over it and move on.